Tag: fern identification

A Mendip wordfest!

The upper end of Velvet Bottom

Where else in the world could you get the sheer sensual pleasure of writing “buddle pit”; “Velvet Bottom”; and “swallet” in the same sentence? That’s a rhetorical question because there’s no other correct answer except Charterhouse, a tiny hamlet in the Mendip hills, surrounded by what’s called gruffy ground -an area that’s been surface mined for lead and occasionally copper since Roman times if not before that. The names themselves have a vaguely erotic undertone, like West Country soft-porn – unless, that is, you’ve actually been there; and if you’ve been reading this blog for any time you’ll know that it’s one of my favourite places on earth.

So today we decided to celebrate the late autumn and early winter by going for a wander down the valley. It’s an extraordinarily rich environment. Years ago we took the boys for a walk there and spotted two of the biggest adders we’d ever seen – sunning themselves at the bottom of the shallow pit in the photo at the top. This pit, and others further down the valley are the buddle pits where the pounded lead ore was left to settle – the heaviest and richest falling to the bottom. Obviously a pretty dirty and polluting process, and a new sign board near the best preserved dam describes how an angry mob from Cheddar came up and destroyed some of the head works because the polluted water had travelled underground and was emerging in Cheddar where it was killing the fish. The story of pollution – painfully familiar today – didn’t end in Victorian times because not so long ago the residents of Shipham, nearby, were told not to eat produce from their gardens because of residual cadmium pollution from the same group of mines.

Of course this marginal post-industrial landscape is a paradise for plant hunters and is, nowadays, a great place to find some rare plants. Today we watched three Buzzards circling beneath a mob of agitated seagulls which had been enjoying the muck spreading in one of the fields above; but not much by way of wildflowers apart from a few brave Red Campions huddling down in the sheltered pits.

But there’s never a day when you don’t learn something interesting up there, and today it was a lesson in pteridology – ferns. I’m quite new to fern ID, and so I’m still at the disambiguating stage. Bracken is pretty easy, but down in the valley today it was accompanied by almost equal numbers of Common Male ferns. In summer and from a distance the way to tell them apart is that bracken just spreads untidily whereas Male Fern grows in scruffy but obvious shuttlecocks. Today we could see that the bracken in winter dies back to a familiar pale brown, whereas the Male fern turns almost black as it dies back. You can see it quite clearly in the photo at the top, as you can equally see that some kind of banding is going on with the Bracken and Male Fern each having their own preferred spot. All these clues add up towards an instinctive recognition of the jizz of a species. Elsewhere, and all the way down the track, we could see where badgers had been scraping the grass back looking for something to eat.

We stopped and ate a sandwich at Black Rock quarry and then strolled back up rather more quickly as an early sunset was likely under the thick cloud. A nice walk.

Winter camping – here we come!

Pen y fan in February 2016

Did I mention that we love going to the Bannau Brycheiniog – the Brecon Beacons – or, according to the spellchecker here on my laptop, the “banana strychnine”. Every year as the clocks go back and it gets dark so painfully early, we try to squeeze in one last camper-van trip before we drain the water tank and pull the curtains. Summer is never long enough. It’s over now to fungi and ferns and we managed to fit in a walk around the woods on the Mendips last week which was disappointingly light on fungi but challenging on the fern front. I remember well the early days when I thought there were just Dandelions until I discovered that they were just a small part of a huge group. These discoveries always leave me equally exhilarated and depressed. On our walk, and with a good deal of hands and knees stuff, I confirmed what I already knew in my heart of hearts – that not all green and ferny looking things are called Bracken (any more than all overweight white middle class men in Rohan trousers are called Dave). At once, exhilarated and depressed, I lashed out on a couple (more) ferny books and settled down for a good read. I am abashed; vanquished; and breathlessly looking forward to a ferny bash in the Bannau.

So it’s been a bit of a week – two exhibitions; Paula Rego and Goya at the Holburne Museum and Rinko Kawauchi: “At the edge of the everyday world” at the Arnolfini in Bristol; an excellent talk by the Director of the Holburne at BRLSI and two films – “The Outrun” in Bath and “A sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things” – both of them lovely; the second, showing at the Watershed was a biopic of Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham a shamefully neglected modernist artist. After the usual depressing few autumn weeks we felt like students again, bathing in fountains of glittering inspiration. Of course the payback came with exhaustion and an urgent call to the doctor when my heart rate went down to 45 and blood pressure to 92/61. I’d have to have been a saint not to laugh when the doctor told me that my symptoms were caused by the drugs I was prescribed to cure the symptoms! I don’t want to expire in a Kafkaesque cycle of thwarted goodwill.

Anyway, the sun’s shining and we’ve booked a spot alongside the Monmouth and Brecon canal. I’ve also been sorting through hundreds of old flower photos but I’m held up by the absence of replies to emails requesting bits of information. If this army of citizen scientists is ever going to live up to its immense promise, the learned institutions need to get over themselves and answer emails from those of us without PhD’s. But then I’m a bit of a loner and the least clubbable person you could imagine. Madame is the only person who comes (dangerously) close to “getting” me – we even hold hands in bed: dangerous!

Finally, I’ve yielded to temptation and bought a black iron bread tin. I’ve had enough of pancake sourdough loaves. Tigger and Eeyore the two starters are going well, and so I’ll re-unite them during the week and start some experiments to create an organic sourdough loaf that stands up enough to make a sandwich with a soft enough crust not to rip the roof of my mouth or snap teeth off. Then when that’s done I’m going to write a long letter to Keir Starmer to explain that his job is not to shuffle bits of spreadsheet around like a junior manager in a shoe shop, but to reunite managerial competence with a bit of visionary leadership and some ethical backbone which he seems to have lost somewhere along the way.

A creaking gate lasts longest!

Male fern – Dryopteris filix-mas – I think; with Hart’s Tongue which at least I’m sure about!

I blame Helena, our VC6 (North Somerset) County Recorder, for getting me interested in ferns. Madame and I had joined a field trip to the Mendips, and in particular to a nature reserve elegantly named “GB Gruffy” The day is etched in my memory for two reasons; firstly because Helena spotted and named an unusual fern nestling six feet down a gated mineshaft. At the time my knowledge of ferns was confined to Bracken and Hart’s Tongue and I wasn’t even sure about bracken, so I was filled with admiration for her expertise. The other reason for remembering was that somehow I lost a rather expensive telescopic lens whilst yomping across the tussocky clumps in a deep bog.

Ferns have been around an awfully long time – around 300 million years – so they can certainly claim longevity in addition to a complicated sex life and the gift of occasionally doubling up on their chromosomes. They are – it’s true – very challenging to identify, or at least some of them are, and so they’re also fatally attractive to propeller heads like me. So after my brief excursion back to my old day job which really did stir up the silt of memories at the bottom of my pond, Madame made sure that our time was filled with anything that didn’t involve me wearing a frock. Distraction therapy, you might say. So we went up to Mendip to hunt for fungi – rather unsuccessfully; then we went to a fine lecture on bees – but not honey bees – and I found myself volunteering to lead a field trip in the spring, the thought of which is terrifying because I’ll be with a couple of co-leaders, a birder and an entomologist who really know what they’re up to. Imposter syndrome is a painful business! We drove back up to Priddy in the campervan for a couple of nights but the trip was overshadowed by heavy rain and thick fog, so we came home a day early. Since then we’ve been vaccinated for flu and Covid and I’ve had my new drug regime finalized. There’s nothing fatal wrong with me except worn out joints and an over excitable heart which requires that I take medicines with nasty side effects and which take weeks to bed down. My only concession to all this is to wear mittens a lot of the time because I now have Raynauds and my fingers get painful and stiff. I’m not quite 300 million years old but it occasionally feels like it, and so I’ve become a bit of a creaking gate.

Now prepare yourself for a true stinker of a link because a real creaking gate featured in yesterday’s walk. The sun was shining and Madame, continuing her campaign of loving distraction, took us off to Newton Park for a stroll around the lake so I could look for ferns and try out three new ID apps on my phone. This is going to be the subject of my talk next spring – phone apps and AI and their strengths and weaknesses.

Newton St Loe is a place that seems to be wholly owned by the Duchy of Cornwall and so it’s a picture perfect village where even the no parking signs are made from cast iron. We parked the car as far from the signs as we could and bumped into a party of about a dozen people led by a man wearing a Viyella shirt with well pressed trousers and gleaming brown shoes. I concluded that he was a land agent or some such because they were all laughing at his jokes. We joined them as we walked up the road towards the church and unwittingly divided them into two groups. As we left the churchyard I became fascinated by the creaking of the gate because it sounded three distinct notes and so they waited a bit impatiently as I swung it to and fro and even sang along with it. I love the sounds that gates make. There’s a broken gate made from tubular steel on one of our favourite walks where we camp at St Davids. It sings sweetly like a flute and depending on the wind strength will even fluctuate over several harmonics. S

]Natural sounds are so important. Later as we sat alongside the lake I was trying out a birding app called Merlin – which is amazingly accurate. There were few birds that could compete with the sound of the wind in the still fully leaved trees, but crows, jackdaws, coot and mallard were all calling. Aside from that our best sighting was a hornet which dashed for cover among some laurels, and I found lots of Male ferns, which isn’t surprising because they’re ubiquitous in the UK. On the other hand I do at least know now what they’re called and – being a bit of a creaking gate myself – I could just have 299 million years left to learn the rest of them. But I’m not holding my breath.

Postscript

Having written this piece, I realized in the middle of the night that with a little bit of detective work I could probably find the name of the fern that Helena spotted – apart from asking her, that is. So there’s a very useful document from the British Geological Survey which I often refer to, called the Biodiversity of Western Mendip which covers most of my favourite places. Turning to the section called GB Gruffy Site I discovered that a moderately unusual fern called the Brittle Bladder fern, Cystopteris fragilis occurs on that site but just to double check I went to the BSBI Atlas 2020 website and searched for it. One of the key tools for finding plants is to know their habitat and so when I read that this fern is most often found growing in the semi darkness of cave entrances and mineshafts and then found a confirmatory 2 KM dark square with the site in the middle I was delighted. Even more delightful was the news that one of my long-term bucket list plants – the Spring Sandwort, Minuartia verna also grows nearby. All I need to do is wait ’till next spring!

Restharrow time

I guess that the harrowing of a field, even with a team of horses, would come to a halt when the tines dug into a mat of this plant. We’ve seen it before but always near the coast; I think the last time was in Portscatho in Cornwall but that was before my phone camera days – now my Pixel 6a does it all + lat & long which with a bit of fiddling yields a National Grid reference and a searchable database as well.

But I also love the name, because resting and harrowing have such wide fields of reference and the plant name Restharrow conjures up a ploughman calling his team back by name with a loud whooooa and pondering his next move. Wood engravings by Thomas Bewick, paintings by Samuel Palmer and the writing of George Ewart Evans come to mind and I’m plunged into rural history by a small but very pretty plant and a name with a cloud of meanings.

These words, the ones that trail clouds of meanings are useful but also tricky. On Friday night I was sleepless for hours. A southwesterly gale was blowing; rocking the campervan and soughing noisily through the leaky windows and I caught sight of the moon through a small gap at the top of the blind. But the moon wasn’t about to lend herself to any of the usual associations. For a start she was pale golden yellow rather than silvery and her usual progress across the sky seemed – well – vagrant, furtive under interrogation by my sleepless mind. Is it even possible to imagine a vagrant moon, stealing across the sky over Ramsey Sound with a haul of sunshine from somewhere always beyond the western horizon and then sinking quietly behind the clouds, or behind the brightening sky, in the dawn?

I lay awake for a while more and had one of our nocturnal chats with Madame, then fell asleep eventually attempting to disambiguate the highly ambiguous Male-ferns we’d found and photographed. It’s like counting sheep without ever arriving at a conclusion and sleep came as a relief

I think I must be addicted to the west; to sunsets and South Westerly storms and to the sunny days that always feel like a gift rather than a right. Here we watch the fierce tides flow through Ramsey Sound, intermittently covering and revealing the Bitches, a dreadful reef to any unwary sailor or canoeist – not that it ever seems to deter them. During the daytime the peace is rent by the ribs which offer so-called wildlife tours around the island but which seem to be extreme water adventures in anything but name, probably terrifying the wits out of any seals unfortunate enough to have hauled up on an inaccessible beach. I really cannot imagine any less viable way of seeing wildlife than travelling in a (f) bucking rib at 30 mph.

The gale hasn’t let up for days, but we get intermittent spells of sunshine and it’s been good for plant hunting and then cataloguing in the stormy intervals. That’s a good holiday – arriving with a suitcase full of worthy books, encountering the mental equivalent of a clump of Restharrow and being forced to slow down or take a break.